Mar 26th 2012 - What's new with the Viamente Route Planner

The main ones have been designed to improve the flexibility of your planning while scheduling rests for your drivers and off windows for your customers.

Drivers' Rest Break

When defining a Driver's settings, you will notice the new field Rest Break: this is the length of the break (for example for lunch).

Right by this field there is Starting between: if the Driver has a break, these two fields will define the Time Window within which you would like the Driver to start his/her break. The starting time of the break will be an output of the optimization process, with the Route Planner suggesting the best moment (within limits of a User-set Time Window) for taking the break, thus minimizing its impact on the level of service.

The information about the Break is included in the Driving directions when you export them and in the bubble which pops up if you click on a Driver on the map (see below).

The Break is also visualized in the Driver's timeline, which you see under the map if you click on the Drivers tab. This way even at first glance you can see when the Driver will stop during his/her sequence of Orders.

Additional Time Window

The second new feature is the chance to add a Second Time Window when adding/editing an Order.

A typical usage scenario is one with a shop that can be served in the morning or in the afternoon, but not during lunch break. By setting two Time Windows for this Order (one for the morning and one for the afternoon), we give the Route Planner two valid alternatives to choose from and we make sure that lunch break is not considered. The Route Planner decides then which of the two options is the optimal one and assigns the Order to the best available Driver.

If you are adding/editing Orders one at a time, you can define a second Time Window by pressing the green button you see in the screenshot below.

After you press it, the fields for setting a second Time Window appear:

In the example above, by setting two Time Windows the Route Planner is forced NOT to serve the Order in the interval between the two, i.e. 12pm and 1pm.

Of course the new feature is supported even if you are importing a list of Orders with an Excel/CSV file. The templates you can download from here already include the new fields.

The information about the Second Time Window is included in the Driving directions when you export them and in the bubble which pops up if you click on an Order on the map (see below).

The information is also visualized in the Order's grid, which you see under the map if you click on the Orders tab.

Absolute vs Percentage Visualization of Resource Saturation

The third feature is a new button found under the Drivers tab. By clicking on it you can toggle Load and Time values.

You can visualize them as percentages:

Or you can visualize them as absolute values:

As usual, do not hesitate to give us your feedback and suggest what you think we should develop next!
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